[eccr] Fwd: The Weekly Spin, Wednesday, May 14, 2003

>THE WEEKLY SPIN, Wednesday, May 14, 2003
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>THIS WEEK'S NEWS
>
>1. 24-Hour Mid-East TV To Promote "Freedom & Democracy"
>2. NY Nuke Plant Hires Giuliani
>3. Big Media Have No Incentive Not To Please Party In Power
>4. White House Denies Conflict Of Interest
>5. Where Have All The Weapons of Mass Destruction Gone?
>6. The War, As Told To Us
>7. Salam Pax Back in Iraq
>8. CNN's Aaron Brown Backs Out of Video 'News' Show
>9. Campus Ink Tanks
>10. Prime Time Liar
>11. 'Green Industry' Prepares For PR Fight
>12. DJs Nixed for Dixie Chicks Picks
>13. The Secrets of 9/11
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>1. 24-HOUR MID-EAST TV TO PROMOTE "FREEDOM & DEMOCRACY"
>http://www.thehill.com/news/051303/tv.aspx
>   The White House expects congressional funding to the tune of $64
>   million for the first-ever, 24-hour Arabic-language satellite
>   television network. "The aim is to provide the Middle East's tens
>   of millions of viewers with an alternative to their usual viewing
>   diet of unremediated anti-American propaganda," the Hill's Melissa
>   Seckora reports. Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting
>   Board of Governors (BBG), called the proposed network "the most
>   important public diplomacy initiative of our time." Westwood One
>   media mogul Norman Pattiz, who sits on the BBG and has produced TV
>   news for Iraq, bills the proposed Mid-East TV as a "journalistic
>   mission" to "promote and sustain freedom and democracy," the Hil
>   reports. "We want to give the Arab world an example of what a free
>   press is. We want to do it in a way that is not like the
>   sensationalistic approach taken by the media in that region, one
>   that includes incitement to violence and disinformation," Pattiz
>   said.
>SOURCE: The Hill, May 13, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052798402
>
>2. NY NUKE PLANT HIRES GIULIANI
>http://www.odwyerpr.com/members/0513rudy_entergy.htm
>   Fearing the Indian Point nuclear plant is an appealing target for
>   terrorists, neighbors, activists and local officials are demanding
>   that parent company Entergy shut down the facility, which is
>   located 35 miles upstream from New York City. The New Orleans-based
>   energy company, which owns nine other nuclear power plants, hired
>   former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's PR firm to help out with
>   security and crisis management issues. O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports
>   that Entergy enlisted Giuliani Partners for its "real-world public
>   safety experience" earned following the Sept. 11 attack on the
>   World Trade Center. "Giuliani's firm includes former NYC police
>   commissioner Bernard Kerik and fire chief Tom Von Essen. Kerik is
>   to represent Entergy as 'in-house consultant,' and represent it
>   before public hearings," O'Dwyer's writes. Burson-Marsteller does
>   PR for Entergy.
>SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily, May 13, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052798401
>
>3. BIG MEDIA HAVE NO INCENTIVE NOT TO PLEASE PARTY IN POWER
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/opinion/13KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&position=
>   The proposal to change the FCC's media ownership regulations "may
>   be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the
>   smaller fish," the New York Times Paul Krugman writes. Krugman
>   warns of the danger of quid pro quos between the administration and
>   big media. "Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run
>   a major story that might damage the Bush administration -- say, a
>   follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional
>   report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise
>   embarrassing questions about the administration's performance.
>   Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration
>   could punish any network running that story. Meanwhile, both the
>   formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented
>   blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. ... We don't have
>   censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different
>   points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media
>   companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that
>   pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to."
>SOURCE: New York Times, May 13, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052798400
>
>4. WHITE HOUSE DENIES CONFLICT OF INTEREST
>   When George W. Bush visited the Santa Clara production facility of
>   United Defense last week, most reports focused on Bush's praise for
>   the company and its products. What wasn't covered was that the
>   maker of the Bradley fighting vehicle and the Hercules tank
>   recovery vehicle is controlled the by Carlyle Group and that George
>   H.W. Bush is a paid adviser to United Defense. The Corporate Crime
>   Reporter writes that the White House denied any impropriety in Bush
>   Jr.'s visit to the plant. "[W]hat it the President's father was the
>   President of United Defense," White House Press Secretary Ari
>   Fleischer was asked. "Would that be unethical?" Fleischer
>   responded, "What if the President's father was on Social Security,
>   and the President wanted to strengthen the Social Security system
>   so that all Americans could have a strong retirement?" Financial
>   journalist Dan Briody, who wrote The Iron Triangle: Inside the
>   Secret World of the Carlyle Group, told CCR, "Ari is very good at
>   what he does. In this case his job is to dismiss and diffuse an
>   obvious conflict of interest by using humor and logical fallacies."
>SOURCE: Corporate Crime Reporter, May 12, 2003
>Web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/May_2003.html#1052712001
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052712001
>
>5. WHERE HAVE ALL THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION GONE?
>http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030512fa_fact
>   With George W. Bush proudly proclaiming victory in Iraq, many
>   worldwide continue to ask, "Where are the weapons of mass
>   destruction?" In the U.S., "Some [Congressional] members are
>   beginning to ask and to wonder, but cautiously," a senior
>   legislative aide told the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. "For many, it
>   makes little difference. We vanquished a bad guy and liberated the
>   Iraqi people. Some are astute enough to recognize that the alleged
>   imminent W.M.D. threat to the U.S. was a pretext. I sometimes have
>   to pinch myself when friends or family ask with incredulity about
>   the lack of W.M.D., and remind myself that the average person has
>   the idea that there are mountains of the stuff over there, ready to
>   be tripped over. The more time elapses, the more people are going
>   to wonder about this, but I don't think it will sway U.S. public
>   opinion much. Everyone loves to be on the winning side."
>SOURCE: The New Yorker, May 12, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052712000
>
>6. THE WAR, AS TOLD TO US
>http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0508-03.htm
>   "Washington has constructed a simple, heroic narrative of freedom
>   and asked us to ignore the much messier human devastation and
>   tragedies of this war," novelist Diana Abu-Jaber writes in the
>   Washington Post of the U.S. war on Iraq. "There are angry outbursts
>   against America across the Middle East, and most Americans have
>   almost no idea why. ... Our news programming has been instrumental
>   in the marketing of this war. ... When I said on one radio show
>   that I've traveled throughout the Middle East as an American, with
>   American friends, and have felt nothing from the Arabs but
>   friendship and hospitality, I received an e-mail from one listener
>   who wrote, 'Don't you know that Arabs hate us? It's all over the
>   news.' Of course, if Arabs are systematically portrayed as an
>   essentially hate-filled people, that makes the marketing of a very
>   expensive war and occupation much easier to manage."
>SOURCE: CommonDreams.org, May 9, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052452800
>
>7. SALAM PAX BACK IN IRAQ
>http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
>   At the beginning of the war, an anonymous Iraqi calling himself
>   "Salam Pax" was weblogging from Baghdad. The postings stopped for
>   several weeks, but now he is back online, with a backlog of
>   street-level stories about the war and its aftermath. "War sucks
>   big time," he says. "Don't let yourself ever be talked into having
>   one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start
>   dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your
>   street you don't think about your 'imminent liberation' anymore."
>   On the other hand, he is "really glad that we can now at least have
>   hope for a new Iraq. ... The truth is, if it weren't for
>   intervention this would never have happened. When we were watching
>   the Saddam statue being pulled down, one of my aunts was saying
>   that she never thought she would see this day during her lifetime."
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052371856
>
>8. CNN'S AARON BROWN BACKS OUT OF VIDEO 'NEWS' SHOW
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/business/media/08DRUG.html?ex=1053398917&ei=1&en=c51593379136b494
>   In response to an article by Melody Petersen in the New York Times,
>   "CNN said yesterday that Aaron Brown, its nighttime news anchor,
>   would not go forward with plans to become host of a series of
>   corporate-sponsored videos that look like news and are broadcast on
>   public television stations. ... A Boca Raton, Fla., production
>   company, WJMK, recently hired Mr. Brown and Walter Cronkite, the
>   former CBS News anchor, to serve as the hosts of a program called
>   the American Medical Review. Drug companies and other health care
>   companies pay WJMK about $15,000 to have their companies or
>   products featured in the videos, which are two to five minutes long
>   and run between regular public television programming. ... WJMK
>   markets other programs, including American Business Review and
>   American Environmental Review, each with one of the newsmen as the
>   host."
>SOURCE: New York Times, May 8, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052366400
>
>9. CAMPUS INK TANKS
>http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-et-johnson7may07183418.story
>   At the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina, more than a dozen
>   earnest college students gathered for training in how to start
>   their own conservative newspapers and opinion journals and how to
>   pick fights with lefty bogeymen on the faculty and in student
>   government. "By the end of the day, the student journalists were
>   fired up for battle," writes John Johnson, "determined not only to
>   change the tenor of notoriously liberal campus dialogues, but also,
>   in the long run, to alter the basic makeup of the nation's
>   professional news outlets. ... In the wake of Sept. 11 and the war
>   on Iraq, seminars such as this one are brimming with recruits to
>   the battle for the hearts and minds of America's college students."
>SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052280002
>
>10. PRIME TIME LIAR
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23059-2003May6.html
>   Stephen Glass, the writer who was fired five years ago for
>   fabricating facts in his stories, has declined to speak publicly
>   about the incident - until now. This Sunday, "60 Minutes" will
>   feature an interview with Glass, who is promoting a novel about his
>   frauds, titled The Fabulist. "Glass uses only one real name - his
>   own - in a fictionalized treatment of how he bamboozled the world
>   as a 25-year-old New Republic writer who always seemed to have the
>   most colorful scenes and the most perfect quotes," writes Howard
>   Kurtz. "Perhaps fittingly, the other characters all have fake
>   names." Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic's literary editor,
>   commented that "even in his reckoning of his crimes, he seems
>   incapable of nonfiction. It's unbelievable. This may be the first
>   novel ever written for the sole purpose of avoiding fact-checking."
>SOURCE: Washington Post, May 7, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052280001
>
>11. 'GREEN INDUSTRY' PREPARES FOR PR FIGHT
>http://www.landscapemanagement.net/landscape/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=56002
>   The trade organization Professional Lawn Care Association of
>   America wants "to create a positive message about the benefits of a
>   well-maintained landscape." Landscape Management, a landscape and
>   lawn care trade publication, writes that PLCAA is sponsoring a
>   meeting next month to address "threatening issues" faced by the
>   "Green Industry. ... These include issues pertaining to pesticide
>   and fertilizer use, air pollution and water restrictions." PLCAA
>   Vice President for Government Affairs Thomas Delaney recently told
>   the PLCAA board of director, which includes representatives from
>   lawn care business and the pesticide industry, that the "Green
>   Industry and particularly the lawn care sector is under attack here
>   in the United States and in Canada because of misinformation
>   propagated by zealous activists."
>SOURCE: Landscape Management, May 6, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/May_2003.html#1052193605
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052193605
>
>12. DJS NIXED FOR DIXIE CHICKS PICKS
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19571-2003May6.html
>   Country radio station KKCS, part of the Clear Channel network, has
>   suspended two disk jockeys for defying the station's ban on playing
>   music by the Dixie Chicks. The Chicks were banned from many Clear
>   Channel stations after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized
>   President Bush. The station has received 200 calls from listeners,
>   75% of which want the ban lifted, but station manager says he gave
>   the DJs "an alternative: stop it now and they'll be on suspension,
>   or they can continue playing them and when they come out of the
>   studio they won't have a job."
>SOURCE: Washington Post, May 6, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/May_2003.html#1052193604
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1052193604
>
>13. THE SECRETS OF 9/11
>http://www.msnbc.com/news/907379.asp?0cv=CB10
>   "Even as White House political aides plot a 2004 campaign plan
>   designed to capitalize on the emotions and issues raised by the
>   September 11 terror attacks," report Michael Isikoff and Mark
>   Hosenball, "administration officials are waging a behind-the-scenes
>   battle to restrict public disclosure of key events relating to the
>   attacks. At the center of the dispute is a more-than-800-page
>   secret report prepared by a joint congressional inquiry detailing
>   the intelligence and law-enforcement failures that preceded the
>   attacks - including provocative, if unheeded warnings, given
>   President Bush and his top advisers during the summer of 2001."
>   Bush administration officials are "refusing to declassify many of
>   its most significant conclusions" and have "essentially thwarted
>   congressional plans to release the report by the end of this
>   month."
>SOURCE: Newsweek, April 30, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1051675201
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Carpentier Nico (Phd)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University Brussels
Studies on Media, Information & Telecommunication (SMIT)
Centre for Media Sociology (CeMeSO)
Office: C0.05
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
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